Clark Gregg on Coulson, the 'tiny, guerrilla S.H.I.E.L.D.' we'll see in S2

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Marvel’s small-screen spinoff Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. dropped some major bombshells in that season-one finale, and now Agent Coulson himself has opened up about what’s coming next.

Clark Gregg, who plays the resurrected-agent-turned-S.H.I.E.L.D.-director, chatted with IGN about where the series might go when it returns this fall. With all the Hydra fallout and post-Winter Soldier insanity, the season ended on a great setup for a bolder, more ambitious (and hopefully more interesting) year two.

Gregg seems to agree, and had this to say when asked if we’ll see a more “off-the-grid” take on S.H.I.E.L.D. now that it's essentially an unaffiliated rogue agency being rebuilt from the ground up:

“That's a really interesting point just because what's been clear to me is that the Agent Coulson who's running this team post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, post-Hydra, post-being killed and brought back to life with something in him he doesn't understand… He’s a very different Coulson than the guy who everyone knew. A lot of people who knew him in the old days say, "He's different." I think you would have to be different having gone through that stuff. So I think he's reinventing himself and re-understanding himself as a person anyway, which is probably really necessary to taking in the new environment and figuring out what SHIELD ought to be in a way that it doesn't get rotten again …

Well, Coulson got to watch himself pre-memory wipe describing why he thought the whole Tahiti Project was a bad idea. He was talking about all the things that were happening to the people they were using on it and why he suggested they can the whole thing - and looked pretty shaken while he was saying it. So I've got to suspect that some of the stuff he saw and some of those patients have some version of the stuff that's going to happen to him. So we go from having no SHIELD at all, with a director on the run, to a tiny Guerrilla SHIELD with Agent Coulson at its head, and maybe not in his own right head. That sounds fun. That sounds like an interesting Season 2.”

We’d have to agree. The first season was all right, but it was missing that spark that keeps the Marvel movies burning. It started having fun by the end, though, and we’re hoping that excitement will carry over into the new season.

Gregg also touched on the network’s plan to finally keep the series running consecutively week to week (as opposed to a week on, two weeks off), except for a midseason break that will make room for the new prequel series Agent Carter. Here’s his take on the new scheduling plan:

“I think it's a great idea. I think in the present age of TV, nobody wants to go down two weeks here, three weeks there. I don't like it. I don't think our fans liked it. It didn't let us keep the momentum going with the story. It's been amazing to watch how much the show clicked into gear, first of all, after the events of Winter Soldier, but when we got to run 10 episodes without a break. You can download the season of so many shows on Netflix in one day -- who wants to take a two-week pause? I don’t!"